On the negativity of aesthetics in general and Kantian beauty in particular

Abstract

This article aims to define the negativity of the Kantian beauty in order to see how it contains a disciplinary principle of aesthetics. First, we give a historical introduction to aesthetics to indicate the basic assumption from which we start, namely, that aesthetics is historically constituted from a platonized Christian doctrine of love (§1). Then we will give an account of some aspects of the idea of a philosophical system in order to underline the importance of beauty in the whole of the Kantian philosophy (§2). Then we move on to the central chapter of the article, in which we justify, on the basis of an exposition of the “Analytic of the Beautiful”, that the aesthetic object is constituted from its loss (§3). In order to justify how this loss of the aesthetic object belongs to the disciplinary constitution of aesthetics, we will briefly review the post-Kantian aesthetics (§4). At the end we make a review of our main arguments and also we point out the problems which remain unresolved.